


come upstairs but not to talk

by jazzonia



Series: we're always alright [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Feelings and Fucking, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Finale, Rough Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-21
Updated: 2016-03-21
Packaged: 2018-05-28 03:45:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6314065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jazzonia/pseuds/jazzonia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank comes to her straight from the firefight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come upstairs but not to talk

He comes to her straight from the firefight.

Karen hears him before she sees him, her senses still adrenaline-sharp just ten minutes after staggering back into her crime scene of an apartment. The cops had been too busy to keep eyes on the hostages, so once she saw Frank's hulking form retreat from the edge of the roof Karen turned and walked north. Say what you will about crime in Hell’s Kitchen; at least the commute home from kidnappings is short.

Frank could’ve appeared at her window soundlessly like Daredevil had, she’s sure, but he probably wanted to give her a chance to shut her curtains over the jagged blown-open windows or ignore him as he made his way down her fire escape. He didn’t need to—she knew he’d come back, knew he’d at least want to look at her again before becoming a creature of the night, or whatever vigilante anti-heroes did these days.

He drops down into a crouch on the platform outside her window, dressed for combat as the Punisher. There's a long hulking weapon in one of his hands, but the other lifts to knock hangnails of plywood out of the window frame. 

“Nice paint job,” she says, eyes catching the silver skull on his flak jacket. It glints in the light from her single functional lamp, just about visible from where she sits cross-legged on her bullet-riddled desk. All the fear and self-filtering are wrung right out of her, and she feels almost in control as she sits and watches him. “You’re lucky I didn’t get around to boarding that window up again.”

“With what, quarter-inch ply? Wouldn’t do shit.” His voice sounds rough but steady, no longer so raw, reinforced by whatever new confidence or conviction accompanies the uniform. Days ago she would’ve heard a threat in that sentence, but in her eerie calm she simply accepts it as fact. Walls wouldn’t stand between Frank and something he thinks of as his to protect.

“Weapons stay outside if you’re coming in,” she says, hopping down from the desk. He snorts, but then unfurls, propping some heavy-looking machine gun against the brick wall of the tenement. In one lithe step he’s inside her apartment. He takes in the debris-strewn floor and pockmarked walls, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.

“Sit if you can find somewhere that doesn’t have glass on it,” Karen says. “I haven’t been back since—well, since. I don’t even know how many days it’s been.”

“Me neither,” he says, unmoving.

“I wonder if I even paid rent this month.” She punctuates it with a bitter laugh. “Bills rank very low on my list of concerns right now.”

“I thought you said we were done,” Frank says abruptly, finally meeting her eyes. He looks like she felt back in the woods: combative, cautious, pissed off and hopeful. 

She counts through her breathing as she tries to come up with a response. For the first time all night she feels a little unsteady, grateful for the sharp edge of the desk against her backside. On her next inhale she smells him—the sweat, blood, paint, gunpowder, and under it, a whiff of diner coffee—and knows what her answer is.

“I’m using two hands and never letting go.”

Even while she watches it happen, Karen knows she will always remember the pirouetting of Frank’s expression from guarded fear to guarded hope to something impossibly tender.

She steps forward but doesn’t reach for him, letting him search her eyes and face for whatever he needs to find there.

After a moment Frank swallows, licks his lips, and shrugs his overcoat to the ground. The tremor Karen can see in his hands, silhouetted against the orange-red glow of Hell’s Kitchen out her shattered windows, sends a shiver right through her before they even touch.

Then, miraculously, inevitably, they do. Frank slides one huge hand around her hip to draw her toward him, and she sighs relievedly into his mouth. 

His lips are just as soft as she knew they’d be even as their kisses grow desperate and bruising. Karen’s hands come up to cup his face, thumbs stroking gently over the purple-green mess of his cheekbones. She can’t shut her eyes, not even when Frank’s grip on her hips tightens and sends a deeply satisfying shiver from her scalp right on down her spine.

He feels that, of course, and huffs out a little groan. It’s just about the hottest thing Karen has ever heard. “Come here,” she gasps, hauling him toward her bed. His hands won’t leave her as she shoves pillows out of the way, running relentlessly over her sides and stomach. The bedding is coated in plaster and dust so she just peels it all off, followed by her own filthy dress.

She turns and Frank looks at her with unmitigated hunger. He lets go but never stops watching her as he sheds his vest, boots, and thick woven shirt in short efficient movements. Karen’s cunt throbs at the sight of him in an undershirt, his thick arms and wide shoulders straining its seams, then again when he strips his shirt off and flips his dogtags around to hang down his back. His hands move to his belt and she shudders, reaching out to tug his pants down over his incongruously slim waist. 

Frank steps between her feet and drops them down onto the bed. He curls over her, one hand smoothing the hair from her face even as he slides one knee up to nestle right between her thighs. Karen nearly sobs as she ruts against the hard hot mass of muscle, body strung so tight that she comes in moments. Frank licks into her mouth and she answers with teeth. Karen’s ravenous, insatiate, her stomach tensing every time Frank’s thigh flexes.

“You’re still not naked,” she gasps.

Frank laughs, hitches his knee up further. “You complaining?”

She rolls her eyes, pushes him backward, and sits up to unclasp her bra. Frank strips off his underwear before she even sees what color they are and returns to kneel between her legs.

“See? Much better,” she says, reaching down to squeeze his long thick cock. She strokes him slowly and grins at the flush that spreads along his chest. Frank’s eyes close, his hips strain forward, and his flushed mouth falls open.

 _He’s surrendered,_ Karen realizes with a heady rush of disbelief and lust and gratitude.

Then Frank opens his eyes and looks at her, through her, breathes, “You are so fuckin’ beautiful.”

“Is that so?” Karen says, aiming for teasing but sounding more than a little tender.

Frank gives a sliver of a smile. He moves backward, pulling out of Karen’s grasp, and she pouts comically in return. He runs his hands up and down the insides of her thighs, stopping just shy of her panties.

Her hips strain upward to get him that last inch closer. “We got all the time in the world, babe,” he murmurs, mouth poised over her breast. 

She closes her eyes for a moment and all of a sudden there’s a mouth tonguing her nipple and a palm curling against her pubis. The heel of Frank’s hand rocks up against her clit, massaging her through soaked panties. His fingers stroke teasingly over her labia at the same time, delicate and searing hot, hand fitting snugly between her thighs.

The friction, the heat, the blunt thrill of teeth on her breast—before long Karen’s on the edge again, hands scratching down Frank’s wide back and muscled sides. His mouth moves up to her neck, biting wide and loose over her windpipe. Karen moans, and without thinking twists her head to the side to lay her throat out for him. This, more than anything, seems to set Frank off. He lets out this plaintive endearing whine, pushes aside her underwear, and slides two fingers into her.

Karen cries out, ears hot and skin awash in goosebumps as this new sensation pulls her sharply into orgasm. She blinks out of it quickly, for which she is grateful; she doesn’t want to miss even one second of this.

“Frank, Frank, please fuck me,” she says, hands squeezing down his forearms, sending him into a full-body shudder. His mouth moves to her other breast and she twists into it, opens the drawer of her bedside table to grab a condom.

She runs one hand through Frank’s hair, pulling his head up toward hers. He grabs the condom out of her hand with his teeth, as she’d hoped, and opens it with the aid of the hand not buried in Karen’s cunt. He keeps up his rhythm while putting it on, one hand pumping into her while the other carefully rolls out the latex. Karen has to laugh at his proficiency.

“If you’re laughing I’m not doing it right,” Frank says, which only makes Karen laugh again. She’d been compelled by the Punisher’s mystique and drawn to Castle’s vulnerability, but it was Frank’s sweetness that had her heart jumping into her throat.

Karen closes her eyes as Frank withdraws his fingers, then blinks open again at the sound of fabric ripping. “Did you just _tear off_ my _underwear?”_

“What’re you gonna do about it, Ms. Page?”

“I’m already in bed with you,” she says, mouth quirked. “You don’t need to charm me further.”

“Babe, we are just getting started,” Frank murmurs. Karen resists the urge to shut her eyes again because she cannot afford to indulge in thoughts of the future right now.

Instead she sits up, lays a hand against Frank’s (ridiculously chiseled) chest to guide him down—because God knows she couldn’t push him if she wanted to—and climbs astride his stomach. She twists her hair into a knot, cants her hips back to press her ass back invitingly against his erection.

“Oh, honey,” Frank groans, eyes fixed on hers as his hands roam across her body.

Karen’s been more honest with him than anyone in her life, she realizes. They’ve spent maybe eight hours together, half of them in the presence of armed guards and the other half evading police and escaping firefights. Those ten minutes in the diner were the freest they’d ever been together—and now here they are, a day (days?) later. _How did this happen?_

She wants to say something stupid and sappy, “I thought I’d lost you,” or something equally trite, but she can’t get the words out. She smooths her hands over Frank’s chest instead, feeling the hard muscle layered with scars, fresh cuts, half-healed scabs, a watercolor palate of bruises. She steadies herself there with one hand as she kneels up, grasps his cock, and sinks down onto him.

As much as she’d like to draw this out, to make him sweat and hear him beg and make him call her “babe” again, Karen can’t wait another moment. She works herself on Frank’s cock, sliding slowly up and down the whole hard length of him a few times. His eyes close as his forehead tenses and relaxes in turns. Karen can tell from the tensing of his arms and thighs that he’s holding himself very deliberately still, and she feels her face flush when she imagines what his body could do to hers if he really let go.

Just when she’s got a rhythm going Karen sits down _fast_ , shifts her weight onto the hands she has planted on Frank’s chest, and _grinds_ down onto him.

“Come on,” she says, and Frank gets the message, lifting her up by the backs of her thighs to give himself more leverage. A couple of strokes and they’ve got it, Karen rolling her hips as Frank thrusts up and, fuck, she’s gasping as he hits her right _there_.

Frank grins, _grins_ , and raises his head to catch her mouth once more. They kiss, messy and tender and open-mouthed. 

Karen’s saying something but she’s got no idea what it is. She gasps and probably cusses as Frank sits up and rocks her onto her back. She arches toward him as he bites down her jaw, throat, clavicle; thick cords of muscle stand out in his neck as he bends to gather a mouthful of breast, anchoring him to her chest as he thrusts in and out of her.

 _It’s his name,_ Karen realizes. She’s murmuring his name as she strokes his hair and shoulders and back, trying to make him feel even a little bit as enveloped and safe as she does. Her fingers sink into the back of his neck when he starts to thumb her clit, and she _writhes._

“ _Frank,_ ” she gasps. His rhythm stutters and he answers with a moan into her sternum. She can feel him pulsing inside of her as he comes. Her cunt aches with an echoing throb of arousal, just this side of painful.

Frank makes no move to withdraw. He slides his cheek up Karen’s chest to rest on her outstretched arm. His eyes are closed so Karen just looks, her mouth twitching up into a smile when she realizes he looks exactly how she feels: peaceful.

They’re lying in a bed in the middle of a crime scene, nothing but a fire escape separating them from the chaos smoldering outside. Frank’s face is battered, his shoulder seems to be bleeding, and his lips are bitten beyond recognition; Karen was a hostage two hours ago and can’t remember when she last ate or slept.

She’s been through enough traumas to know that this high will end, that a crash is imminent. She’s an unemployed not-journalist with a bruised heart, fractured friends, and now a fugitive in her bed. 

But for this moment, at least, there is peace. And these days, on these streets, that's enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> More to come. This season was so good, I've got plot bunnies for days. 
> 
> Title from Alabama Shakes.


End file.
